The unexpected phone call came on the Feast of the Epiphany in 2018. A pregnant mother was making an adoption plan for her baby. She had some very specific hopes in mind for the potential adoptive parents.
Catholic writer Emily Stimpson Chapman and her husband, Chris, fit the bill perfectly. But had they made any progress on their adoption plans? Their adoption consultant wanted to know.
Emily and Chris had only had their first meeting with the adoption consultant the previous month. But they had been praying about adoption for some time.
Longtime friends, the couple had married when Emily was 41 and Chris was 48.
“We knew going in that there was a good chance we might not be able to conceive,” Emily said.
Still, she had done everything she could to address possible infertility, even undergoing two surgeries.
“There was a hope that we would be able to conceive,” she said. “But we also knew maybe we would conceive once.”
After 18 months of infertility, the couple began praying about adoption.
“We wanted more than one child and I have been around adoption my whole life, really,” Emily said. “I’ve known a lot of families that have adopted; one of my dear friends is a birth mother; I know a lot of adoptees. So, I was very open to adoption from the start. Going in, both Chris and I had talked about that—that we wanted to be able to conceive, but we also were super happy to become parents in whatever way God had.”
While they desperately wanted to start pursuing adoption, the Chapmans were currently “drowning” in the hefty renovation of their Pittsburgh home, which Emily says, “was falling down.”
By the end of 2017, the couple was just starting to breathe again: There was an end in sight for their renovations. So in December, they met with an adoption consultant to get the ball rolling on building their family.
They didn’t realize how fast it would roll from there.
When the call came on the Feast of the Epiphany in January 2018, Emily and Chris had neither a profile for the birth mom to view nor a home study to move forward with.
But Emily told the consultant they would have a profile over to her in two days. A professional writer, Emily cranked out a profile for the birth mom to view and the couple was chosen.
“That was just a rollercoaster ride,” Emily said. “We kind of did it all backwards. We were chosen by a mother before we had a home study, before we had the funding, and it was very complicated… It was a very dramatic, intense seven months that we waited for Toby.”
Adoption laws vary widely from state to state, something which frustrates Emily and other adoptive parents who are trying to make sense of the adoption process. For example, some states set limits on how much adoptive parents can be asked to pay towards a birth mother’s expenses. In California, where Toby’s birth parents live, there is no limit.
To meet their needs and pay for the adoption, Emily and Chris borrowed against their house. Friends held an adoption fundraiser for them, and family supplied them with extra cash to help keep up with the birth parents’ needs.
By the time they brought Toby home in July 2018, the Chapmans believed they were at the end of their adoption journey.
“We could not foresee ever adopting again, just because financially, it just seemed absolutely impossible,” Emily said.
“Toby’s gonna be an only child,” they thought.
“We were like, ‘Great—God gave us one baby,’” Emily said. “’This is wonderful. This is more than we ever thought we might have.’ And Toby was just a joy—a wonderful, wonderful baby. He’s a wonderful toddler.”
Despite the seeming impossibility of ever adopting again, when the Chapmans received another unexpected phone call in September 2019, they found themselves saying “yes” to adoption once more.
“Somehow, He Will Provide”
Toby’s birth parents were expecting another baby.
“Of course, we said, ‘Yes’–there was no way we wouldn’t say, ‘Yes,’” Emily said. “It was automatic. There’s no way we’d ever say, ‘No,’ to one of our child’s siblings.”
She explained the importance of preserving the sibling bond through adoption.
“Adoption is very difficult and very complicated and it’s something that adoptees and adoptive parents and birth parents process for the whole of their life,” she said. “And so being able to have two siblings grow up together so that there’s someone in the house who looks like you, someone in the house that has shared biological history—that’s a real gift. And there’s no way we’d ever say, ‘No.’ So we didn’t even have to think about that. We would’ve put the whole thing on credit cards if we had to.”
Emily compared it to finding yourself in an unexpected pregnancy and trusting God in that experience.
“Okay, well, there’s a baby coming, and God has entrusted this baby to us again,” the Chapmans thought. “So somehow, He will provide and make it happen.”
One of the ways in which He provided was through the idea of writing a cookbook. By now, Emily had grown quite the reach on Instagram. With her love of hospitality, food, and hosting, Emily hoped to create an e-book to give away to those who donated to the Chapmans’ adoption fundraiser.
Sadly, before Emily could launch her project, Toby’s birth mother suffered a miscarriage at 16 weeks. As hard as that loss was, the Chapmans decided to move forward with the hopes of a second adoption anyway.
In January 2020, Emily launched the book, “Around the Catholic Table: 77 Recipes for Easy Hospitality and Everyday Dinners.” The next day, she shared that her supporters had already gotten the Chapmans almost halfway to their fundraising goal.
“Our hope was that it would help us raise enough money to adopt a second child debt-free,” Emily wrote on her website. “By God’s grace, it did.”
Throughout the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Chapmans endured the pain of waiting and waiting for a baby. Then, in July 2020, the Chapmans were sitting on their front porch swing, talking about what they were going to have for dinner, when they received a phone call from their adoption consultant.
“A baby boy had been born last night in Dallas,” Emily wrote at the time. “He needed a family. Were we willing to be that family? It took us all of five seconds to say yes.”
The Chapmans were on the road two hours later. Once in Dallas, they settled in for what would become a nearly four-week-long NICU stay for their second son, Beckett. Their tiny baby had been born at just 32 weeks. It would be the longest time Emily had spent away from Toby, while she hunkered down in the NICU, and Chris and Toby stayed with some close-by friends.
Finally, almost a month after the family of three had left Pittsburgh for Dallas, the new family of four headed back north.
Then, six days after the family had arrived home, the couple received another life-changing phone call.
Saying “Yes” Again
A friend had just brought over a meal for the family. Emily was in the kitchen, holding Beckett and chatting with her friend, when Chris came in to tell her about the call.
This one came from the adoption consultant from Toby’s birth.
“Toby’s birth parents were expecting again, and they wanted us to adopt,” Emily said. “And I’m holding this tiny, little preemie who’s not even full-term yet because he’s like 36 weeks at that point.”
As she would later recall, “It took 30 minutes for my husband and our adoption attorney to convince me I wasn’t being punked.”
For the same reason the Chapmans had said, “Yes,” to Toby’s other sibling, now in Heaven, they said, “Yes,” to this baby, too. For months, they kept the news their own, praying diligently for the birth parents and their baby, keenly aware of the potential for loss.
The baby made it to 36 weeks—one week before her birth mother’s scheduled c-section—when she decided to make her appearance on Good Friday 2021. The Chapmans were already en route to California when she was born. They would name her Eleanor Rose Collette Chapman—or, “Ellie,” for short.
After she was born, she was life-flighted to a hospital in Sacramento for closer observation for breathing issues, making for a second NICU experience for the Chapmans in eight short months.
“Not the most fun weeks of my life,” Emily said. “But Ellie did great, and she started thriving and we were able to come home. And so now we have three. We thought we might never even have one. And it’s just been very, very, very fast.”
“So Much Grace Is Given”
Having welcomed three babies in less than three years, Emily recognizes that she is in a challenging phase of parenthood, but that it is “easy” in some regards.
“I’m in the physically demanding stage, like the exhausting stage,” she said. “But it’s so easy right now—Toby is just starting to ask questions.”
When a friend had a miscarriage recently, Emily was explaining to Toby that her friend had lost the baby in her belly. Toby asked if Emily had once had a baby in her belly.
“I reminded Toby that, ‘Mommy can’t have babies in her belly. So that’s how we adopted you,’” she said.
She’s aware that as time goes on, more questions will come. Life circumstances may evolve. The Chapmans cannot have a relationship with Toby and Ellie’s birth parents, and Beckett’s birth mom has chosen not to pursue a relationship with them—but that could change.
As the Chapmans think ahead to what possibilities could lie down the road for them, right now, they are focused on building bonds with their babies in these early years.
“I do think with adoption, you have to go in knowing you’re gonna parent differently,” Emily said. “You’re gonna have to work harder for attachment, harder for connection. And you’re gonna have to maintain that to help your child develop security about something they can’t even articulate. There’s a deeper need for attachment and security with a child who’s been separated from their first home than there is for a biological child.”
As such, the Chapmans practice attachment style parenting, providing plenty of skin-to-skin and babywearing to their little ones. They don’t sleep train and utilize minimal babysitting. They have found ways to be flexible with their finances so that Emily can be a stay-at-home mom.
“I am extremely fortunate with what I do that I’m able to find ways to be as creative as I have been and be home with the children,” she said.
With as much prayer, time, money, and thought as the Chapmans have put into their three adoptions, Emily says the whole beauty of adoption is that it is complicated yet simple at the same time.
“I think adoption is something you both want to overthink and not overthink,” she said. “It’s a really beautiful calling and you want to understand it. You want to talk to people in different positions within the triad, and really understand the complexities of it, the beauty of it. But at the same time, it’s about a baby and it’s not hard to love a baby.
“I think that’s the biggest fear people have going into adoption is, ‘Oh, they’re not my baby. They won’t look like me. Will I actually love the baby?’… And they’re completely your baby,” she said. “I mean, God makes up with grace, whatever is lacking in nature. It really is a supernatural call to adopt. God is inviting you to image for the world His relationship with humanity. And if you go into it with maturity and faith and trust, so much grace is given. And it is never hard to love a baby. It’s not hard to love a baby.”
